1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a self-service borrowing/returning system, and in particular to a self-service cleanroom suit borrowing/returning system and a self-service borrowing/returning method thereof.
2. The Related Arts
With the development of contemporary mass production, while in the progress of improving production facility and logistic system, businesses are continuing upgrading internal rear-service system, such as automatic punch clock machine system, automatic sales machine system, and automatic value recharging machine system, in order to increase overall performance of the production system. It is well known that good tools are prerequisite to the successful execution of a job. Thus, automatic office systems would be of great help for improving employees' performances in the office and reducing waste of waiting time in a manufacture process would be helpful for improving manufacture performance of production facility. In recent decades, great progresses have been accomplished for various automatized systems. In modern large cities, self-service borrowing/returning machines are quite common and these machines provide convenience of service to general consumers in exactly the same way as automatic teller machines.
Employees of liquid crystal manufacture companies are required to wear cleanroom suits before they enter cell workshops, color film workshops, and array workshops. However, some of the employees may not have their own cleanroom suits and must borrow ones from a cleanroom suit keeping department. Each time a person wishes to borrow a cleanroom suit, he or she must first locate the cleanroom suit keeper and make a registration of borrowing before the person can get a cleanroom suit. The cleanroom suit so borrowed may not be exactly fit in size and it is may also be troublesome to exchange the unfit cleanroom suit with others. It is often that access to a cleanroom has to be done immediately but the cleanroom suit keeper cannot be timely located for borrowing a cleanroom suit and time is just elapsing. Such troubles of waiting, locating, making registration of borrowing cleanroom suit, and sometimes, exchange of borrowed cleanroom suits deteriorate performance of the employees and thus affecting the performance of the business.
FIG. 1 is a flow chart illustrating a before-improvement conventional way of cleanroom suit borrowing/returning process. With such a known cleanroom suit borrowing/returning process, the cleanroom suit keeper must be first located and the keeper may be busy or out of office, so that waiting with patience is inevitable. Secondly, related information must be filled in a registration table for borrowing cleanroom suit and this is time consuming and tedious. Thirdly, the cleanroom suit keeper has to seek for a proper set of cleanroom suit and this also takes time. In case the cleanroom suit for sought is not fit, replacement of the cleanroom can be troublesome to the cleanroom suit keeper. In addition, returning the cleanroom suit also need to go through the same process of locating the keeper and making record of the related information and then the cleanroom suit is handed to the keeper for confirmation.
On the other hand, modern technology has been gradually applied to the field of self-service borrowing/returning machine and a newly developed technique of radio frequency identification is now taking the place of long-used barcode identification technique with the unique benefits thereof. The radio frequency identification, which is commonly abbreviated as RFID, is a non-contact active identification technique that is realized with radio frequency techniques. Compared to the barcode techniques, RFID has benefits in respect of functionalities of transmissibility and obstacle-free reading, fast scanning, repeated usability, data readability/writability, as well as compact size, diverse shapes, contamination resistance, durability, great amount of data memory, and safety. Chinese Patent No. CN200610076520.6 teaches combination of RFID with robot techniques so that operations of self-service borrowing/returning, looking up, searching, and shelf arrangement can be realized with the robot thereby reducing manual operation. It is appreciated that the RFID based self-service borrowing/returning system can be expanded to applications of automatic warehousing of various goods.